Outside CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, stands another
bronze, life-size statue, this time of Nathan Hale, his hands
bound and a noose around his neck. A graduate of Yale, he is celebrated
as America's first `patriot spy'. He was a 21-year-old
captain in George Washington's Continental Army when he volunteered
to spy behind British lines. Captured in New York City,
he was hanged in September 1776. As he mounted the scaffold, he
is reputed to have said, `I only regret that I have but one life to
lose for my country.'

Four years later Major André, spymaster to the British commander
Sir Henry Clinton, suffered the same fate as Hale for
negotiating with Benedict Arnold, the commander of West Point,
to betray its secrets to the British. Caught when the plot was
foiled, he was hanged by the Americans in October 1780.

Both spies have become legendary in the annals of Anglo-American
intelligence. Yet behind each stood a spymaster usually
invisible or unnoticed. American mythology long held that the
New World had cast off the evil habits of the Old, not least the
murky world of espionage, counter-espionage, codebreaking,
deception and domestic surveillance. Yet the nation's first
President, George Washington, regarded intelligence as one of his
top priorities. `The necessity of procuring good intelligence,' he
told one of his secret agents, `is apparent and need not be further
urged. All that remains for me to add is that you keep the whole
matter as secret as possible. For upon secrecy, success
depends ...' Most of his successors took the same view. When
William Casey, Director of Central Intelligence under President
Ronald Reagan, declared that his first predecessor was none other
than George Washington, he was uttering an awkward but undeniable
truth about the traditions of the White House.

As for the British, its leaders have always relied on secret services
to obtain intelligence about foreign powers and keep tabs on
dissidents at home. The Victorian years of peace and prosperity
made this less important. But for both America and Britain the end
of the nineteenth century was a turning-point. The defeat of the
Spanish Empire in the war of 1898 meant that the United States
was now a world power, while the rise of the Kaiser's Germany
posed a threat to a Britain already under pressure from Irish
nationalism and domestic radicalism. The Americans created an
Office of Naval Intelligence, and in 1909 the British, in total
secrecy, established the Secret Service Bureau for both espionage
and counter-espionage.

Roosevelt and Churchill, then both young and aspiring politicians,
absorbed the spirit of these years. The intensity of their
partnership during the Second World War often obscures the fact
that in many respects they were an ill-assorted pair. Paradoxically,
each defied his national stereotype. Churchill, the nostalgic
Victorian wedded to the glories of Empire, was emotional, direct
and transparent, with a lifelong predilection for the company of
self-made men. Roosevelt, the New World Democrat, had the
manners of an English gentleman, and behind the surface bonhomie
was impenetrable, enigmatic, secretive and machiavellian.
Churchill carefully wrote down his thoughts and instructions.
Roosevelt was deliberately informal, often giving inconsistent
verbal orders. Churchill described him as `a charming country
gentleman whose business methods are almost non-existent'.

Yet they had much in common. Each was an ambitious high-flyer
who lived and breathed politics, and each courageously
overcame severe handicaps: Roosevelt a crippling attack of polio,
Churchill a debilitating childhood stammer and lifelong bouts of
depression. Both leaned heavily on their wives. Eleanor became her
husband's political eyes and ears, Clementine provided the emotional
rock on which Churchill stood. Each, too, was accused of
being a turncoat and evoked bitter political enmity. The patrician
Roosevelt who brought in the New Deal was loathed by
Republicans, while many British Tories never forgave Churchill's
early radicalism or his maverick behaviour after he returned to the
Conservative fold. Echoes of these controversies still have potency
on both sides of the Atlantic.

They shared another thing in common. From their knowledge
of the world and experience of politics they knew what intelligence
could deliver. Neither lacked courage to use the levers of office,
and intelligence was a useful source of power and influence.
Combined with their personal vision and imagination, it delivered
important rewards. Roosevelt has been described as a `genius of the
unexpected, maestro of the improvisational, [and] artist of the
dramatic [whose] mind danced across the scene where his legs
would not carry him'. Churchill was similarly agile  `his mind
once seized of an idea works with enormous velocity around it',
noted the British journalist A. G. Gardiner, a rare and early
admirer, on the eve of the First World War, `[it] intensifies it,
enlarges it, makes it shadow the whole sky'.

By nature, Roosevelt liked secrets. An only child with a powerful
mother, he needed them. A lifelong reader of spy novels, as a student
at Harvard he constructed his own secret cipher for recording
special confidences in his personal diary. One such entry translated
into `E. is an angel'. It referred to his cousin Eleanor, the favourite
niece of President Teddy Roosevelt, and he married her soon
after. But his first encounter with the official world of intelligence
came as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson.
Here he found himself responsible for overseeing the Office of
Naval Intelligence. It had been a small and sleepy outfit until the
First World War catapulted it into the wider and rougher world of
international intrigue.

Roosevelt's enthusiastic embrace of its work marked an important
moment in American intelligence. He spent much of 1916
organising the Naval Reserve Force, where he cast aside the
pretence that Americans were innocents and recruited like-minded
Ivy League friends for secret work. Like him, they regarded it as
both glamorous and legitimate. Those destined to run American
intelligence in the future would no longer be regarded as social
outcasts or political lepers, but could include the best and the
brightest. He even recruited an espionage network of undercover
agents in Latin America behind the back of an exasperated
Director of Naval Intelligence.

In July 1916, in the so-called `Black Tom' incident, German
saboteurs set off an explosion that destroyed the most important
loading terminal in New York harbour for munitions to Britain. It
convinced Roosevelt that there was an extensive `Fifth Column' of
GermanAmericans conspiring to sabotage the war effort. After the
United States finally entered the war in 1917, he bombarded the
new Director of Naval Intelligence, Captain Roger Welles, with
requests for information about alleged German-American plots,
sent him alarmist reports from his own sources, and even fantasised
later that he had carried a revolver in a shoulder-holster after
becoming a target for assassination by German secret agents.

Welles proved a congenial soulmate and soon the ONI was
stuffed with Wall Street lawyers, financiers and stockbrokers.
Roosevelt also learned about the significant co-operation that had
developed with British naval intelligence in the United States
through their naval attaché, Captain Sir Guy Gaunt. A colourful
Australian-born bon vivant, Gaunt had taken to the murky world
of counter-espionage like a duck to water and ran a network of
agents penetrating German-American organisations and others
considered subversive by the British. When not running his agents
from the Biltmore Hotel in New York City, he was carefully cultivating
Colonel House, President Wilson's confidant and
trouble-shooter. `[Gaunt] tells me,' confided House to his diary,
`the British intelligence is marvellously good.' Thanks to Gaunt,
ONI files soon bulged with the names of Irish rebels, Hindu plotters
and Bolshevik terrorists.

Gaunt's superior in London was the legendary Director of
British Naval Intelligence, Admiral Sir `Blinker' Hall, who ran
British naval codebreaking (known as Room 40) as well as a multitude
of secret agents engaged in covert operations around the
globe. Admiral Sims, the American naval representative in
London who had his own intelligence operations in Europe, told
Welles that Hall and the British had broken `practically every
cipher' that they had been put up against. The Zimmerman
telegram affair dramatically illustrated the point.

In January 1917 the German Foreign Minister, Arthur
Zimmerman, sent a cipher telegram to the German ambassador in
Mexico announcing his country's decision to begin unrestricted
submarine warfare the following month. If the Americans entered
the war, Zimmerman wrote, he would suggest that Germany and
Mexico `make war together, make peace together', with Mexico
being rewarded with territory from Texas, New Mexico and
Arizona. Audaciously, Zimmerman sent the telegram via Count
Bernstorff, his ambassador in Washington, using the American
transatlantic cable recently placed at Berlin's disposal by President
Wilson to facilitate peace feelers. What neither Wilson nor
Zimmerman knew was that British codebreakers were regularly
tapping the cable to read American diplomatic ciphers. They
quickly intercepted Zimmerman's message, broke its cipher, and by
early February its plaintext was lying on `Blinker' Hall's desk.

How the British naval intelligence chief resolved the dilemma of
revealing Zimmerman's plan to the Americans while disguising its
source is the stuff of spy fiction and has often been told. Simply
put, it involved a British agent in Mexico City stealing a copy of
Zimmerman's telegram and claiming it had been intercepted in
North America. Thunderstruck at this German duplicity, Wilson
abandoned hopes of remaining neutral and publication of the
telegram in the press paved the way for Congress to approve his
declaration of war in April. German espionage both within the
United States and `at our very doors', as an outraged Wilson
declared, proved that Berlin was neither peaceful nor trustworthy.

Roosevelt was entranced by the whole affair, especially as,
behind the scenes, one of his oldest Harvard friends had played a
part in the coup. This was Edward Bell (`Ned' to Roosevelt) who
under cover as Second Secretary of the American Embassy in
London was liaison officer with Hall and other British intelligence
agencies. It was to Bell that Hall had handed the text of
Zimmerman's message once it was sanitised for American eyes.
Roosevelt had done favours for Bell, and soon Bell was able to
reciprocate.

In July 1918 Roosevelt arrived in Britain on official navy business.
Welcomed at Portsmouth by Admiral Sims, he was whisked
off in a Rolls-Royce to the Ritz Hotel in London. Here the British
laid out the red carpet. The First Lord of the Admiralty organised
an inspection tour of British and American bases, he had a friendly
talk with Prime Minister David Lloyd George, he drove out to see
Nancy Astor at Cliveden, and he met Arthur Balfour, the Foreign
Secretary. He also had a forty-five-minute audience with King
George V, proudly writing to his mother that the monarch was
shorter than he expected but `delightfully easy to talk to'.

But the highlight of his visit was a personal call to the Admiralty
and Bell's good friend, `Blinker' Hall. Roosevelt never forgot the
encounter. In the midst of their talk Hall suddenly said, `I am
going to ask that youngster at the other end of the room to come
over here ... I want you to ask him where he was exactly twenty-four
hours ago.' Roosevelt did as he asked. `I was in Kiel, sir,'
replied the young man. That he was talking to a secret agent supposedly
returned from behind enemy lines so impressed Roosevelt
that twenty years later he could recount the episode in detail to
Hall's successor, Admiral John Godfrey, in the White House.
What he probably failed to realise was that it was all a charade
designed to divert attention from Room 40's codebreaking work.
Roosevelt came away convinced that British intelligence was the
best in the world, blissfully unaware that it was also breaking
American ciphers and would continue to target them well into the
1920s. It was also on this London visit that he had the encounter
with Churchill he later described to Joseph Kennedy.

Back in the United States, Roosevelt's passion for secret agents
almost sabotaged his political career. A homosexual scandal had
engulfed the Newport naval base. Disregarding advice that the
affair was irrelevant to naval intelligence, he set up a special investigative
unit. Paid out of a special fund, its work culminated in the
arrest and trial of several Newport civilians, including the base's
naval chaplain. But the scandal escalated dangerously when it
emerged that sexual entrapment had been used and that enlisted
men had gone well beyond the bounds of duty in their pursuit of
the guilty. The chaplain was acquitted, and a naval court of
enquiry severely criticised Roosevelt for his role in the affair. By
this time he had resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to run
unsuccessfully as Democratic vice-presidential candidate in the
1920 election. The Republican-dominated Senate Naval Sub-Committee
strongly condemned his actions, and while Roosevelt
claimed he was innocent of the details of the Newport investigations
and was the victim of partisan politics, it was clear he had
deliberately kept many of his instructions verbal rather than
commit them to paper. Already he had learned the skills of plausible
deniability.

After he entered the White House in 1933 he quickly resumed
his interest in intelligence. Four years before, Henry Stimson, the
Secretary of State, had abolished the `Black Chamber', the nation's
first peacetime codebreaking agency, famously declaring that `gentlemen
do not read each other's mail'. Later, in the shadow of
Pearl Harbor, critics would claim that this had neutered American
codebreaking during the 1930s. In reality, it merely redirected it
into more secret channels in order to conceal it from an isolationist
nation and Congress. The army set up its Signals Intelligence
Service under the codebreaking genius, William Friedman, and by
the mid-1930s it was regularly cracking Japanese diplomatic
ciphers. By the end of the decade these were being discreetly circulated
in Washington under the codename `Magic'.

Likewise, the navy's cryptanalytic branch, Op-20-G, made significant
headway against Tokyo's ciphers, although it was
constantly racing against ever more complex machine systems.
Then, shortly after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war, in
December 1937, the gunboat USS Panay  the American navy's
most successful spy ship of its time, crammed with intelligence
material (and the first American warship destroyed by enemy
action in the twentieth century)  was sunk in the Yangtse river by
Japanese warplanes while observing Japanese operations outside
Nanking. Behind the scenes Roosevelt was already contemplating
the intelligence alliance he was to forge with Churchill. Four days
later the British ambassador in Washington, Sir Robert Lindsay,
was a guest of honour at a White House reception. Afterwards,
Roosevelt asked him to stay behind for a private conversation.
Here he reminisced warmly about Sir Guy Gaunt and Anglo-American
intelligence co-operation during the First World War,
hinting strongly that he had been deeply involved. Surely it was
time to again inaugurate a systematic exchange of secret information?

Lindsay thought Roosevelt was in one of his worst inspirational
moods and that his ideas sounded like `the utterances of a harebrained
statesman or amateur strategist'. Nonetheless, he said
they were worth exploring. Over the next twelve months Roosevelt
discreetly supported highly secret talks between the British
Admiralty and the US Navy which led to limited intelligence
exchanges the following year. After Hitler's occupation of Prague
in March 1939 killed off hopes of European peace and intensified
demands for naval talks with the British, Roosevelt repeated his
praise for Gaunt. Simultaneously an old friend, Admiral William
Leahy, the commander of naval operations (and later his wartime
White House chief of staff) oversaw an expansion of the Office of
Naval Intelligence and its strengthening in the naval hierarchy.
Roosevelt also initiated exchanges of military information between
the American and British armies.

But Roosevelt was never content with official channels alone. He
also developed personal contacts as alternative sources of information.
One of the most prolific was the syndicated Washington
journalist John Franklin Carter, whose appeal to Roosevelt lay in
his easy access to the NBC shortwave radio network and the fact
that he could come and go at the White House without attracting
suspicion. Roosevelt used him for private investigative work and
paid him generously from his Presidential Emergency Fund. Apart
from producing over six hundred reports on a huge variety of
topics before Roosevelt died, he also investigated the performance
and loyalty of unhappy members of the Roosevelt team.

Another personal source was the wealthy and gregarious
Philadelphian William C. Bullitt, an influential fundraiser for his
1932 election whom he sent on a private fact-finding mission to
Europe and later appointed ambassador in Moscow and Paris.
There was also the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh, whose
isolationist views and admiration for Hitler opened doors that
were closed to others. After three inspection tours of Hitler's
Luftwaffe, Lindbergh passed on highly exaggerated estimates of
Nazi strength to the White House.

Roosevelt's most prominent informant, however, was Vincent
Astor, his wealthy Hudson Valley neighbour and distant cousin in
whose heated indoor pool at Rhinebeck, just north of the Roosevelt
estate at Hyde Park in upstate New York, Roosevelt had exercised
his polio-damaged legs in the 1920s. In 1927 Astor formed a secret
society he called `The Room', a group of about twenty close and
influential friends from the world of business that met regularly in
New York to discuss financial and international topics. Founded
with Astor and Theodore and Kermit Roosevelt, sons of the
former President, it included the banker Winthrop Aldrich, the
journalist and world traveller Marshall Field III, the publisher
Nelson Doubleday, Judge Frank Kernochan, and David Bruce, a
foreign service officer and future wartime head of the OSS in
London and ambassador to London and Peking. Nearly all had
some background in intelligence and one, Sir William Wiseman, a
partner in the Wall Street investment bankers Kuhn-Loeb, had
headed Britain's intelligence service in New York during the First
World War.

Roosevelt highly valued the intelligence they provided, and in
1938 he secretly approved a Pacific cruise by Astor in his luxury
yacht, the Nourmahal, to spy on Japanese military, naval, air force
and radio installations in the Marshall Islands. `The information-gathering
side of our cruise has proved interesting, instructive, and
I hope, will be helpful,' cabled Astor enthusiastically to Roosevelt
from Honolulu.

But in the long run the most important of FDR's intelligence
sources was the wealthy New York lawyer William `Wild Bill'
Donovan. Variously described as America's last hero and its first
director of central intelligence, the silver-haired Donovan was a
man of indefatigable energy and enthusiasm whose thirst for action
and adventure was to leave an indelible mark on America's intelligence
community for the next quarter of a century.

Donovan, said movie director John Ford, who worked for him
during the war, was `the sort of guy who thought nothing of parachuting
into France, blowing up a bridge, pissing into Luftwaffe
gas tanks, then dancing on the roof of the St Regis hotel with a
German spy'. Hollywood hype aside, this neatly captures the
swashbuckling spirit of Donovan that Roosevelt admired. He was
as adept at waging guerrilla war at home as he was abroad, and left
in his wake a trail of wounded bureaucrats and interdepartmental
jungle fires.

A former classmate of the President at Columbia Law School,
he was a self-made man. Born in Buffalo of a poor Irish immigrant
family, he won the name `Wild Bill' while fighting against Pancho
Villa with Pershing's expedition to Mexico in 1916, and he
returned from the Western Front in France as the most decorated
soldier in the American army; serving with New York's `Fighting
Irish' regiment, he won the Congressional Medal of Honor, the
DSC and the Croix de Guerre. Over the next decade he held both
state and federal office for the Republicans, then moved to New
York to establish a highly successful and lucrative business specialising
in international law. Here he made contact with The
Room, where his foreign contacts and travel soon recommended
him to Roosevelt. In 1935 the President sent him on an unofficial
mission to report on Italy's military performance in Abyssinia, and
in 1938 he attended German army manoeuvres and investigated
the Spanish Civil War from General Franco's side. By the time
war broke out in Europe he was an ardent anti-isolationist and
knew more than most Americans about European military affairs.

While Donovan, Astor and others gathered foreign intelligence
for him, others worked on counter-espionage. Hitler had launched
an intelligence war against the United States, and with vivid memories
of the `Black Tom' explosion Roosevelt was soon obsessed
again about German spies in America. In 1934 he summoned J.
Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI, to the White House and
told him to investigate fascist and Nazi groups, later extending the
order to Communists. In 1938 Hoover's men exposed a massive
spy ring operating in Manhattan headed by Gunther Rumrich, a
US Army deserter of German background. The trial that followed
spawned sensational headlines, deepened Roosevelt's fears of
internal conspiracy, and jolted him into seeking increased appropriations
for counter-espionage. He also ordered Hoover to
co-ordinate his efforts with army and naval intelligence and the
State Department. Two years later Hoover reassured him that all
potential enemy espionage was under control. Under Roosevelt, the
FBI enjoyed an enormous expansion of its powers, including an
intensive programme of secret domestic surveillance.

Typically, Roosevelt also liked to be sure himself. Naval intelligence
had always dabbled extensively in domestic affairs, and in
the 1930s it considerably expanded its domestic surveillance, targeting
political and labour radicals and such organisations as the
American Civil Liberties Union. To discuss its reports, Roosevelt
frequently met as often as three times a week with the Director of
Naval Intelligence. To prevent liberal protests he kept such contacts
secret. His efforts to centralise and strengthen intelligence
even further met with bureaucratic and media resistance. `No glorified
"OGPU" [Soviet secret police] is needed or wanted here,'
declared the New York Times.

Ironically, Soviet espionage was already at work in America. But
Roosevelt, like most others, misunderstood the threat. This was
seen in the case of Whitaker Chambers.

A journalist, Chambers was a courier and contact in Washington
for Soviet intelligence. In 1938 he recanted his allegiance to
Moscow, and after hiding for several months to escape Stalin's
assassins re-emerged as a writer for Time magazine. Shocked by the
brutal cynicism of Stalin's pact with Hitler in August 1939, he told
his story to Adolf Berle, Roosevelt's international security adviser
in the State Department, and also pointed the finger at more than
thirty Communist agents at work in the federal government,
including the senior State Department official Alger Hiss. Berle
told neither his department nor the FBI, but did, according to one
source, pass the intelligence on to Roosevelt. But the President
merely `scoffed at the charge'. He was incredulous that there
could be a Soviet espionage ring in his administration; to him
Communists were blue-collar trade union militants, not suave representatives
of the east coast establishment. Gentlemen like Hiss
could simply not be traitors. As a result, no counter-intelligence
programme for identifying Communist agents in the federal government
was put in place.

Six weeks after the Munich crisis Roosevelt chaired a special
conference at the White House to decide on US air power requirements.
A full-scale review of national strategy and war plans was
already under way, and he was deeply alarmed by intelligence
reporting that the Germans were making thousands of military aircraft.
Lindbergh estimated annual German production at some
9,000 military aircraft, a figure backed up by the American military
attaché in Berlin. Bullitt, now ambassador in Paris, had already
passed on similar figures. To Roosevelt, the conclusion was obvious.
This huge air capacity had fatally encouraged Hitler and
intimidated the allies. To defend the western hemisphere, he
announced, America required some 10,000 planes. Thus began
the shaping of US rearmament.

The decision throws revealing light on Roosevelt's approach to
intelligence. For one thing the figures for German aircraft production
were hopelessly exaggerated  the true number was closer
to 3,000 per annum. Second, the intelligence came from a mix of
unofficial and official sources, with Roosevelt giving as much
weight to the former as to the latter. And third, he even came up
with numbers of his own  12,000  from no identifiable source
except his own imagination.

Army Secretary Henry Stimson later complained that Roosevelt
rarely followed a consecutive chain of thought, but was full of stories
and incidents and hopped around in discussion from
suggestion to suggestion. It was all, he despaired, `like chasing a
vagrant beam of sunshine around a vacant room'. This was the
Roosevelt method. Unimpressed by professional bureaucracies, he
most trusted his own contacts  both inside and outside the government
 and combined these with his own instincts and
preferences to reach a policy decision. It was a haphazard way of
dealing with intelligence. Yet his belief that the European powers
had been thoroughly intimidated into appeasement by fears of
Hitler's Luftwaffe was correct, and his natural optimism provided
a necessary counterweight to the inevitable worst-case scenarios
produced by professional naval and military advisers.

Churchill also had a passionate appreciation for intelligence and
secret agents, sometimes to the point of being carried away by the
romantic character of cloak-and-dagger exploits. He had even
been a spy of sorts himself during the war that catapulted
Roosevelt's cousin Theodore into the American public eye. In
1895, when the Cubans revolted against Spain's colonial rule, the
twenty-year-old Churchill, then a junior officer in the British
army, crossed the Atlantic to observe the war from the Spanish
side. Before he left London, Britain's Director of Military
Intelligence, Colonel Edward Chapman, briefed him on the background
and asked him to find out details about Spanish weaponry,
thus placing Churchill firmly in the tradition of the `amateur'
gentleman spy typical of the Victorian age. He was fascinated by
the ability of the Cuban guerrillas to outwit the Spaniards. `What
their own spies fail to find out,' he noted, `their friends in every
village let them know.'

His exploits during the British army's imperial skirmishes in
India, Sudan and South Africa drove home the lesson of how local
intelligence could yield valuable dividends and how its lack could
sow disaster. On the Indian North-West Frontier he travelled
with an army intelligence officer meeting informants. In Sudan,
advancing with Kitchener to Omdurman, he was generously
briefed and hosted by army intelligence and, in a burst of embarrassing
zeal, detained a British agent on suspicion of being an
enemy spy. The Boer War, above all, convinced him that good
intelligence was a vital weapon of war. What else could explain the
success of the Boers  a small, ill-armed bunch of farmers  in
humiliating the imperial might of Britain? Its lack, moreover,
explained many of Britain's failures. `The whole intelligence service,'
he complained bitterly after he returned home, `is starved for
want of both money and brains.' The Boer War also made him
a convert to guerrilla war and covert action. The drama of his own
escape from a prisoner-of-war camp, and his dangerous journey
home, burnished his fascination with heroic exploits behind enemy
lines.

After he entered Parliament in 1900, some of his strongest criticisms
of the British army were reserved for its poor intelligence,
and he demanded the creation of a powerful Intelligence
Department. Events went his way. As the Kaiser constructed a
powerful German navy to challenge British maritime supremacy,
anxieties over national security sparked a series of spy scares. To
keep an eye on German spies in Britain, as well as to improve
intelligence about the German navy, in 1909 Britain's Committee
of Imperial Defence created the Secret Service Bureau, the forerunner
of the two agencies later to become known as MI5 (the
Security Service) and MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service).

Churchill, who by this time was in the Cabinet, was one of the
few ministers to take an interest in the new Bureau's work. Driving
his enthusiasm was the firm belief that a powerful German Fifth
Column in Britain was poised to carry out sabotage and subversion
to assist a German invasion; in truth, no such plan existed,
although German spies were certainly at work trying to uncover
intelligence about Britain's navy. As Home Secretary (1910-11)
Churchill happily gave MI5 extensive powers to carry out secret
surveillance on suspected spies, and as First Lord of the Admiralty
(1911-15) he kept in close touch with MI5's Director, Captain
Vernon Kell. It was Churchill who, on the eve of war in July 1914,
gave the order to Kell to round up all suspected German spies in
Britain.

Like Roosevelt, he was also `hands-on' in his approach. He
liked to read `raw' intelligence reports himself, relished what they
had to tell him, and even employed an agent to report back to him
personally. This was `Captain' Edward Tupper, a burly firebrand
in the seamen's union, who was eager to sniff out German spies at
work in British ports. During the First World War Churchill was
to find him useful in countering strikes and militancy among
British seamen.

But the most important early milestone in Churchill's long connection
with British intelligence came only weeks after war broke
out in 1914. As the airwaves hummed with radio messages between
the fleets and ships at sea and their home commands, top-secret
coded intercepts began to flood the Admiralty. Quickly alerted to
their value for intelligence, Churchill created a special section
known as `Room 40' in the old Admiralty building in Whitehall.
With hard work and lucky breaks, it soon broke all significant
German codes, and from then until the end of the war Britain
could follow the movements of the German High Seas Fleet, trace
the departure of U-boats from their home ports, and read most of
Germany's diplomatic messages  with the results that Roosevelt
and other Americans so vividly learned during the Zimmerman
telegram affair. Again, Churchill insisted on seeing Room 40's raw
reports with his own eyes. So convinced was he of its significance
that he personally wrote out in longhand its early `charter'.

In May 1915 Churchill became the principal scapegoat for the
disaster of the Dardanelles Expedition  a futile bloodletting that
attempted to break the stalemate on the Western Front by opening
up a southern front in the Balkans. The crisis would have been
terminal for most politicians, and it badly damaged Churchill. But
he quickly bounced back, and by 1919 was Minister for War and
Air. By this time Lenin and the Bolsheviks had replaced the
Kaiser's Germany as national bogeyman, and British codebreakers
were busily cracking Moscow's codes. Churchill read these with
the same enthusiasm he had brought to German codes, using their
evidence of Communist subversion in Britain to urge the expulsion
of Moscow's representatives from London. He also lent his energies
to the efforts of secret agents plotting to overthrow the
Bolsheviks. In the chaotic conditions of civil war and famine, a
motley collection of passionate anti-Communists and dubious
adventurers, including the ex-nihilist assassin Boris Savinkov and
the legendary `ace of spies' Sidney Reilly, courted British intelligence
with extravagant plots to topple the Bolsheviks. Churchill
gave them all the support he could, and although their plots failed
he remained mesmerised by the potential of covert action behind
enemy lines to cause mischief and mayhem.

The lessons were reinforced by events in Ireland. In 1922 the
British were forced to recognise the Irish Free State after a bloody
guerrilla struggle in which Michael Collins' IRA also won a ruthless
and protracted intelligence war. Churchill's role is largely
remembered because of his support for the `Black and Tans', a
force of British ex-servicemen notorious for its indiscriminate violence.
But he also pressed hard for enhanced intelligence. When
Sir Henry Wilson, the army's chief of staff, demanded the shooting
of hostages in reprisal for Sinn Féin terrorist attacks, Churchill
disagreed. `It is no use ... saying I should shoot without mercy.
The question immediately arises: "Whom would you shoot?" And
shortly after that: "Where are they?"' In short, what was needed
was an intensified intelligence war.

Out of power after 1929, Churchill created what was almost an
alternative private intelligence service at his home in Chartwell in
Kent. With a vast range of contacts and sources inside and outside
of government, he battered the governments of Baldwin and
Chamberlain with a barrage of facts and figures in his campaign
against the appeasement of Hitler. One of his most important
sources was Major Desmond Morton, an officer he had befriended
on the Western Front. Morton was a senior officer in the Secret
Intelligence Service who in the 1930s ran the Industrial
Intelligence Centre. He was also a neighbour in Kent, and would
frequently stroll over to Chartwell carrying top-secret files to
prime Churchill on statistics about German and British rearmament.
Churchill also had sources and allies in the armed forces and
the Foreign Office who kept him up to date. If Roosevelt was a
`sponge' who soaked up information, Churchill was a vacuum-cleaner
who sucked the last particle of intelligence from every
corner and crevice he could. When war came in September 1939,
he was by far and away the best-informed and experienced minister
to mobilise British intelligence for the tasks ahead.